Naturally Interesting

Start Here:

Raw Milk Debate at Wikipedia

The revolution will not be pasteurized: Inside the raw-milk underground in Harpers

The Udder Truth in Salon

Further Information Here:

FDA - On the Safety of Raw Milk

Real Milk - A Rebuttal to the FDA Presentation

David Gumpert’s blog The Complete Patient

The author of this NYT piece explains how the government is actively preventing him from producing local, organic foods. He had 100 acres of his own and rented 25 more from a neighboring farm. Then learned he was in trouble because he was growing produce on commodity land.

The commodity farm program effectively forbids farmers who usually grow corn or the other four federally subsidized commodity crops (soybeans, rice, wheat and cotton) from trying fruit and vegetables. Because my watermelons and tomatoes had been planted on “corn base” acres, the Farm Service said, my landlords were out of compliance with the commodity program.

And here’s the kicker:

I’ve discovered that typically, a farmer who grows the forbidden fruits and vegetables on corn acreage not only has to give up his subsidy for the year on that acreage, he is also penalized the market value of the illicit crop, and runs the risk that those acres will be permanently ineligible for any subsidies in the future. (The penalties apply only to fruits and vegetables — if the farmer decides to grow another commodity crop, or even nothing at all, there’s no problem.)

The author contends that large producers of fruits and vegetables in California and Florida want to stop small, local organics, and so actively lobby congress for just such absurd results as these.

The bottom line: The commodity program actively inhibits the production of local fruits and vegetable so that American taxpayers can subsidize commodity production that benefits ($$$) ADM, Cargill, Monsanto, large meat producers, etc… Consider this - meat is very expensive to grow, you have to feed it corn grown by other farmers, give it antibiotics, raise it, transport it, slaughter it. Tomatoes - you stick them in the ground and give them a some water.  So did you ever wonder why a pound of tomatoes can be nearly expensive as a pound of beef? One part of the answer is we heavily subsidize beef production, the obesity causing, environmentally damaging food. We don’t subsidize those nice healthy, environmentally friendly tomatoes.

Sam Hurst writes Betting the Farm in Gourmet on the Farm Bill and its effect on farmers. Good read, but long. Here are some highlights:

• The farm bill run more than 1,000 pages of dense, convoluted language. It is traditionally hammered out by an alliance of farm-state politicians and agribusiness groups.  It has been described as “a patchwork of parochial programs lacking a vision.”
• In 1920in Walworth County, there were 653 farms. In 2008, there are 322.
• In the land of industrial agriculture, where people are quick to tell you that heavy machinery, synthetic fertilizers, pesticides, genetically modified seeds, and the federal safety net make farming possible, Matthew’s family has gone back to an old-fashioned, diversified, organic family farm.
• In good times, grain production should expand, in bad times contract. But with farm subsidies, instead of buffering, we have created permanent overproduction, and disaster payments just encourage production on marginal lands.
• What is lost in the caps debate, is the opportunity to shift the entire paradigm of federal farm policy from subsidies and price supports to conservation, stewardship, and support for innovators.
• Under current federal policy, farmers receive “direct payments” each year, no matter what crops they grow or how they grow them. A multifunctional approach would build on and rechannel those payments, along with other crop-support subsidies, toward sustainable social and conservation goals. “Pay farmers to reduce synthetic fertilizers and pesticides. Pay them to diversify their crops, build soil, and restore wetlands. Pay them to develop local mar­kets for their products, especially fresh food.”
• If farmers want to plow native prairie, they should not be in the program. If they want to grow single-crop monocultures without rotation and play the commodity market, that’s their right, but the government should not pay for it. If they pollute, charge them to clean it up. Don’t use public money to pay large hog-confinement operations to build expensive waste ponds. That should be part of the cost of doing business.”

The farm bill - doing whats wrong. Because its gets us re-elected and makes us a lot of money.

According to Agronomy Journal

Can organic cropping systems be as productive as conventional systems” The answer is an unqualified, “Yes” for alfalfa or wheat and a qualified “Yes most of the time” for corn and soybeans according to research reported by scientists at the University of Wisconsin-Madison and agricultural consulting firm AGSTAT in the March-April 2008 issue of Agronomy Journal.

Good news since one of the major arguments for conventional and GMO crops is increased productivity.

Link

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